The journeys of an ambicious Android developer company to the *top class*

Ill is this {asci-art}sy word and the way I felt yesterday, predicting myself a 30-40% productivity. I started by outlining the tasks to accomplish and decided to start with recapitulation of the day before in(to) a little blogpost. The thing that drove my nerves (mad) was any attempt in https://wordpress.com/post/ got stuck on the “Beep beep boop” loading screen…I decided to investigate that mystery to not have to switch Firefox and Chromium back and forth all the time.

Whining on mozilla forums only pointed me to things I already supposed should help, i.e. sniffing around the addons which would be the case.

Therefore I wanted to post their list immediately…which isn’t as trivial as it seemed. You have to install this one more add-on to have your addons listed and yet it’s very premature and the format being plain text. So I have to filter just the active plugins manually. Put this little code( — here it goes as promised) into Sublime’s replace:

(.*(\(Disabled\)|\(Incompatible\)).*)\n

(assure of regEx are checked) and replace all by an empty string. Didn’t you hear yet, you should learn regular expressions, a.k.a. regEx? They are fun and sometimes useful.

Well, it happened to seem the mystery bug disappeared just after throwing Firefox into the Safe mode and coming back. Here was the editor!..just that it did stuck on save/preview this time..:(

To keep with the tradition of Blogging ’bout blogging I have to say I expected more solid stability from in the WordPress interface( — looked different from one day to the other) as well as broader capabilities in it’s editor( in Dashboard). Just one example is you have to go from the “Visual” to the “Text” tab to make a piece of code inline( like this). Other, quite a crucial feature I miss is smaller/larger font size. How they dare to cut that out while leaving a hulk of empty space in the formatting toolbar?

Well, now getting into the ADT bootstrapping so to beget some first scamp Android apps…

Ok, yesterday went from my intention to get dev&deploy process running into unexpected negotiations with the web space. It appeared with a problem of my Firefox totally messed up, after I (flippantly )allowed it to upgrade to version 30…which was an downgrade actually, at least in some regards — The add-on bar got removed as well as many of my customizations( also done with add-ons) got grossly broken.

This is what peed into my face after starting the new version. Page title all missing, addon buttons crammed into the URL/search launchers row etc. I was yet to find out the new menu don’t work(=open) at all…

Well, that is nothing but a trial of endurance — that which distinguish the frightened coward losers from reasonable men.(..was what I said to myself after taking many deep breaths.)

Whimpering about the ‘blind jump of hope‘ upgrade and this “more secure and faster” bright image policy by which the Foundation is foisting the dubious updates, I swiftly approached the havoc by installing Status-4-Evar addon, which recreates the age-old status bar capabilities. I pushed the buttons that unwelcomely (been )moved into the address bar right back into this brand shiny status field where they belong. Disabling some plugins and a few restarts solved( fairly reasonably) other disturbances so was I ready to view, research( with Diigo highlights) and organize theh webz in a consistent flow again.

The other thin(kin)g was, the night before I decided to start a blog to track my daily progress and success(es) with a several words summary. So here I am, picking the most easy-to-use and bullet-fast, yet flexible( unlike Twitter or over-simplifications alike) publishing platform — The great WordPress. Pondering about the domain( name)s and (visual )themes, I skimmed through settings wizard to the first post. This writting I expected to take me minutes was like 3( or 4) hours composition, the result feeling mostly satisfying, though gosh! I must learn to be more concise!

At least I have our web presence (somewhat )covered from both ends now.;)

Basically I made an ordering of the milestones being the ap(k)s I want us to deliver, from the simplest to some more complex and ambitious. This was the focus part of my plan, where I could easily approximate or complete the desired products step-by-step.

Other part of the morning planing ware the long-term (dev&deployment )process policies. These are things dawning around the second key substance for (our/any )future success — the persistence. I retained here the varied ideas I already have on improving my productivity gradually and/with their success-triggers.

The trigger events of certain success achieved guarantee I don’t waste too much time on boosting (my )productivity while not actually producing anything. A substantial production effort accomplished are necessary justification for spending( time) on productivity( processes) improvements.

On the other hand, it’s important to investigate and improve your workflow sometime(s) i.e. to not postpone( or procrastinate) it indefinitely. Setting reasonable turning points assures time is not wasted frequently(/heavily) on repetitive tasks.

Having two long check-lists written up before lunch, I started on exploring the dev resources pointed from gPlay Store. I wouldn’t resist to look at least at the basic Design principles Google recommends and didn’t I refrain from putting a few biting comments here and there( and some approvals too;). Besides form generally recognized UX guides, one think stroke my eye while skimming the title sections of Devices, Style, Patterns and Building Blocks guidance issues — the dp screen units.

What they be ‘baut? You likely know what pixel is — one point( of color) on the screen, but they come in various sizes|densities( ex. with a fullHD resolution on a 5” screen the D(ensity)P(er)I(nch) is quite high). So pixels are not an ideal unit for sizing items that are to appear on a screen. So why not to use the metric units, say declare a button to appear 1 centimeter high and 35 millimeters wide? Well because crap, somebody in Google or around thought out the world just needs more units standard apart from metric and inch/foot/mile( (English/Imperial )crap) so they defined the dp as a size of one pixel in a 160 DPI, which is — you guess — 1/160 of an inch or in the standard physical unit..:

A conclusion? A 48 dp is the minimal dimension to be seen and touched well everywhere.

(…)

The next thinG I dug into was setting an IDE, the workshop for building up our applications. Two options come to scene here: Eclipse ADT( plugin) being the well established standard, while Android Studio( BETA) is the yet budding choice of the future — at least in the current proclamations from Google. Even for the ADT I picked, a minor hindrance (i.e. piece of crap) is there is yet no all-in-one installation bundle, you have to download and install JavaSDK and Apache Ant separately. (Those’ll be for putting the parts of your apps together into the .apks.) The Eclipse IDE bundle then comes as a portable (Java )application — we’ll have to make shortcuts and links for quick launching manually.

Twitching my fingers for giving the IDE the first shot I went into dreaming about all new cool ideas we could build and sell..:)